Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin offers a peek inside his reality

Ken AndersonRichmond FontaineWe're all capable of fooling ourselves, if we work at it hard enough. And at various times in various places, we all have. Anything to help get through the day.

"If you think about things the right way, they don't sound as bad," Richmond Fontaine singer-songwriter Willy Vlautin says. He's sitting in a bar in St. Johns talking about the title track to the band's new (and possibly best) record, "We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River" -- and it can, if you close your eyes and wish it so. The sun going down over an overpass can still make for a pretty sunset.

He knows; he used to live off Interstate 205, just like the couple in the song, who, just like Vlautin, came home one day to find their apartment robbed, trashed.

"All of a sudden," Vlautin says, "all living near the freeway means is I'm a loser. I don't have enough money to live in a better, safer place."

Reality wins again. Reality, usually of the harsh variety, is the undisputed, undefeated champion of Richmond Fontaine's catalog, Vlautin's two previous novels and most likely the upcoming one, "Lean on Pete," due in April and set at Portland Meadows.

With this record, however, it's a slightly different reality: A lot of the songs are more specifically autobiographical.

"My stuff's always been half-truths and half-lies," Vlautin says. "My heart's always true and the ideas are always true, but the characters aren't. This one might be more straightforward. I was trying to be more honest with myself."

For the previous record, 2007's "Thirteen Cities," the band relocated to Tucson, Ariz., to record.

"I guess I was wanting to get to the desert, and I wanted to give up and run," Vlautin says. "Like Harry Dean Stanton in 'Paris, Texas,' just walk the desert."

This wouldn't have been entirely out of character for a band named after a guy who stopped and helped bassist Dave Harding once when he was broken down in the Mexican desert. Fontaine drummer Sean Oldham says they might have been on their way to an instrumental record as Vlautin continued to chase that sound and those songs.

That was before Vlautin's mother died of cancer.

"It made him think about things a little differently and gave the songs a little edge," Oldham says. "Sometimes bad (stuff) happens and it kicks in the dark side, not that there's ever been a lack of a dark side in Fontaine stuff."

But this was different. Vlautin lays it out plain: "It made me want to write love songs. It's a lonely feeling to not have any parents and to not have gotten along with them."

Except Vlautin, try as he might, can't write a straight love song. "Ruby and Lou" was one attempt. It includes a suicide and raises as a question the possibility the whole world is cursed. "A Letter to the Patron Saint of Nurses," the spoken-word tune that closes the album, focuses on the struggles of someone surrounded by death.

But Ruby and Lou realize the world isn't cursed, because they found each other, and the nurse bursts into laughter in a hotel room on the coast because there's this guy who loves her and can still make her laugh.

"We Used to Think" is a record for when the clouds come piling over the West Hills, but it has its sun breaks; it's as touching as it is cinematic. And because they weren't touring, Vlautin says they rehearsed and worked out the record for five months before going into Jackpot Recording Studio with JD Foster, who produced the last three Fontaine records.

"I feel like the band in general, and Willy in particular, have gained so much confidence in their ability to do what they do," Foster says.

Some of that confidence comes from familiarity. Along with Oldham, Vlautin and Harding, Dan Eccles on guitar rounds out the group proper. Paul Brainard adds pedal steel and trumpet. Vlautin's known or played with all of them for at least a decade. Other locals, such as pianist Ralph Huntley, chipped in.

The record was first released in Europe, where the British press loved it and it debuted in the top 10 on the U.K. independent release chart. They had a successful tour there, before returning to Portland last week. After Friday's show at Dante's and a Saturday show in Seattle, they'll head back for another crack at Europe.

They do well across the Atlantic, where comparisons to Raymond Carver and Steinbeck and Springsteen and Tom Waits pile up (and that was just in The Sun). They do OK here. And you'll find no pretension in Vlautin on that subject. He says he's thrilled each time all the guys decide to climb back in the van for a tour, and if they haven't gotten rich, they've had a lot of adventures.

"You always want things to get better," Vlautin says. "If you do a little bit better than you did last week, it makes you get out of bed a little faster."

As the afternoon fades in St. Johns, Vlautin walks out of the bar and is greeted by a nearly full moon he stops to appreciate before stopping to pick up some Mexican takeout and head home to Scappoose, seemingly content with reality. He's relocated his mind back from the desert to the Northwest.

He wrote the song "You Can Move Back Here" for his brother, about Portland, because with their parents gone, they don't have any place to move back to. Maybe they never did.